Discussion

Chinese Cookbooks [split from Boston]

She means something different. In the "Measurement" chapter she writes:

"I want to make it clear that the number of servings from a Chinese recipe is very hard to tell. It depends on how many dishes will be served at the same time. To prevent confusion, I give two kinds of serving methods and numbers in my recipes:

1. American serving: means only one main dish is served along with soup, vegetables or appetizer.2. Chinese serving: means two or three main dishes are served at the same time."

Basically, I agree with tatsu, although I think her cookbook is pretty evenly split between what I might call "authentic-style" and "American-style" Chinese dishes. There are some better Chinese cookbooks from that era, although this is a fine one too.

The list of recipes alone doesn't help determine whether the recipes were either authentic, or Americanized in reasonable ways for the time (for example, substituting beef meat for beef offal while keeping the spicy and numbing sauce.)

Fuchsia Dunlop has a relevant article on General Tso's Chicken, which was invented by a refugee from Hunan province, but is almost unheard-of in Hunan. I'd argue this is exactly the kind of historical fiction most people think of when they think of "Szechuan" food, and here it's quite well documented.

I thought I had a copy of Pei Mei, but I certainly can't find it now. I did find "Chinese Cuisine" (1972, from Wei-Chuan cookbooks) by Huang Se Hei, in a translation by NIna Simonds, and "Ming Lai's Chinese Cookbook (1981--she worked for Pei Mei and Wei-Chuan's cooking schools.) AFAIK, the Wei-Chuan books continue to be updated, and at least one Borders in the Boston area (Copley, I think) stocks some of them. Sadly, I don't have the second Wei-Chuan book, or the author's book on "Chinese Snacks". Meng Lai's book also includes Chinese, which makes it much easier to figure out which obscure preserved vegetable a particular recipe is asking for. And, I have to wonder how widely these books were distributed in the US at the time of publication.

While both of these cookbooks may seem dated compared to the information we now have access to, they're also recognizably authentic--for example, the Hot and Sour Soup recipes contain shredded squid and chicken blood, and sea cucumber and duck's blood, respectively. These books are full of obscure (to me) and interesting recipes, such as fried duck stuffed with taro, which I've only had once, at "Mark's Duck House" near DC, and make me wonder what gems are hiding in the untranslated menus from Pearl Villa and Joyful Gate.

I looked at Delft's book once, but it didn't make a strong impression on me. I know there's one around town somewhere, or maybe at the Strand in NYC.

My favorite from that era is How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, by Buwei Yang Chao. Actually Mrs. Chao wrote that book in Chinese and her daughter, Rulan, translated into Chinese when she was a freshman at Harvard/Radcliffe. Rulan Pian, who is now 88, is currently an Emerita Professor at Harvard. As far as I can tell, she invented the term "stir-fry"!

I have the third (?) edition (1964 I think) and was pretty impressed. The first edition dates from 1945! I'd be curious to know how that compares to the 'modern' version. Wikipedia cites another book from 1974 called _ How to Order and Eat in Chinese to Get the Best Meal in a Chinese Restaurant_ as well as this blog post.

The Chinese Cook Book by Wallace Yee Hong (first published in 1952) is a pretty solid early Cantonese cookbook. My mom used to make the sweet and sour pork recipe from this book, which is an excellent version comparable to anything ever served at House of Roy back in the olden days. (It does make me sad that I know of *no* place to enjoy an old-fashioned sweet and sour, which, properly made, is a perfectly respectable dish.)

However, reading the book through nowadays, I'm truly impressed by how many recipes there are for authentic Cantonese dishes along with the Chinese-American standards. (He, too, is an early user of the term "stir-fry.") There's a fine recipe for basic soup stock, and even instructions on how to make your own soy sauce (three different versions) and oyster sauce!

And, whoever split this thread should've extracted all of the relevant posts, not just some of them. (It's not clear to me that it should've been split at all, since it wasn't a thread on Chinese cookbooks in general, it was about whether relatively authentic Chinese cookbooks were available when Joyce Chen was running restaurants in Boston.)